3 ms·

Imagine if you connected this way: 1. turn on peripheral, 2. choose it from a UI on the device and get connected. That is easy, it is the auto-pairing bullshit

Imagine if you connected this way: 1. turn on peripheral, 2. choose it from a UI on the device and get connected. That is easy, it is the auto-pairing bullshit that forces the software to guess using a heuristic, which guarantees it will get it wrong a non-zero amount of the time. Now that we all have N devices it will get it right 1 out of N times. This is just terrible UX, the choice reality gave us was between auto-pairing that is frequently wrong or having to make one UI interaction. Guess which one they chose? It is a valuable lesson, never let designers hand-wave away reality because they have a delusional vision of a magic device. Acknowledge reality and design around it instead or you will build crap.

naravara 8y ago
There is that one Logitech keyboard that does this. It has a selector dial on the left where you pick which one of 3 possible devices to connect it to. There is still the design problem there however. You kind of have to guess which one 1, 2, or 3 is. And you need the recipient device to actually be on and maintain the connection when you make the switch. So it's not just 1 UI interaction. Depending on your situation, there can be at least 3 and they're spread across multiple devices. Ideally we'd have a standardized overlay or display on any bluetooth device to indicate its connection status and what it's paired to. But that would be its own headache and would seriously constrain how devices can look or be shaped. How much UI can you really fit on a pair of headphones that are meant to be small?